Burning Blue (19 page)

From Nicole’s journal:

Monday, 1 November—

I think he might know.

At four that afternoon, Cherry called with a promise of hot news. “Tell me in person,” I said. I had re-upped my anonymity settings, but I couldn’t be absolutely certain the Recluse wasn’t watching me. Cherry showed up at my apartment with Starbucks scones. “So my father’s cop friend didn’t get an ID on the woman.”

“And this is hot information because?”

“He got a lead on the car owner.” She clicked a picture onto her Droid screen: a shot of the Civic’s rear bumper. “A traffic camera picked up the car.”

“Okay?” I said. “We already had the plate number.”

“Right,” she said, “but we didn’t have this.” She zoomed in on the plate. “The plate itself is bad, yes, but not the plate rack, the kind the dealer gives you to advertise the dealership.” Cherry tweaked the picture, magnifying the plate rack: Vardy Dealership.

I nodded. She left the scones on the counter and hurried for the door.

“What’s the rush?” I said.

“Work.” Cherry DiBenneditto was a very cool girl.

A little after 4:00 Tuesday morning, I cracked the Vardy database. The company had resold four hundred and sixteen 1990s model Civics in the last fifteen years, and none of those went to anybody named Vratos or Wood. By now I’d hacked the class list for Sabbatini’s chem lab. None of the last names matched.

I created a map that covered Brandywine and the Hollows outskirts, and I checked the addresses of the Civic owners with Google Earth Street View, one by one. It took hours. Around 11:45 Tuesday night, about three-quarters of the way down the Vardy list, I found what I was looking for, a dumpy little house not far from my apartment building, in lower Valedale, still in the Brandywine school district but definitely low rent. The black Civic was in the driveway. The stolen plates had been swapped out for the ones registered to the address, but I recognized the car by the gash that ran across the driver’s-side doors. The Civic owner’s name was Roberta Lyles. I tapped up her Facebook page.

Bobbie Lyles listed herself as divorced. She was probably in her early thirties but the lines around her eyes made her look a lot older. She had long blond hair, but she couldn’t have been the woman I saw in the Civic hauling out of my parking lot. That woman was thin, and Bobbie was not. Still, she looked familiar. Those eyes . . . I tapped up Chrissie Vratos’s page. At a stretch, she and Bobbie could have been distant cousins. Maybe they were friends, and Chrissie had simply borrowed the car? Took me about half an hour to go through Chrissie’s posts and albums, and I didn’t find anything that connected her to Lyles. Bobbie’s page took half a minute to scan. She had nothing up there except a handful of pictures, all of crocheted objects. She was using Facebook primarily to promote her home business, handcrafted scarves, sweaters, blankets made to order. She had six friends, and none of them linked her to Chrissie. I tried to connect Bobbie and Marisol Wood and came up empty there too. I tried to link her to the suspects I had already eliminated from my list, Mr. Sager, Kerns, Dave, Schmidt, Sabbatini. I crossed my fingers when I tried to link her to my father and sighed relief when I couldn’t. I couldn’t link her to Marathon, New Jersey, either. I had to dig deeper into that and find out what my father was hiding down there, but not yet. I had one more name I needed to cross-reference with Bobbie Lyles. I hesitated. I forced myself to do it.

She didn’t connect to Nicole either.

I checked to see if the black Civic had been stolen recently. It hadn’t, or Bobbie Lyles hadn’t reported it as such. I ran her address into the cable service provider database. The house was wired for basic television, Vonage, and Internet service. The only machine IDs that came up were for a fax machine, an older model TV and a very old desktop PC, the kind Bobbie Lyles might use for her little startup business, to post her wares on eBay. She listed her employer as Dunkin’ Donuts.

The low-tech computer, low-rent cable, low-wage job: perfect cover—too perfect. That black Civic was in her driveway. She was involved in this thing somehow.

I pulled a long-standing string I had into BinarTREE, one of the major manufacturers of cell phone towers. They owned the northeast with nine of every ten towers flaunting their brand. The towers were equipped with sensors that pinpointed wireless data flow. Obviously media companies would pay dearly to know which homes were gobbling up lots of gigabytes, and then push their products there.

Why was Bobbie Lyles importing ridiculous amounts of data into her home, into her back bedroom, specifically; way more data than that crappy desktop dinosaur PC with its half a gigabyte of RAM could handle? I’d found her. I’d found the Recluse. She had a very powerful computer in that back room, the kind I had, homemade, no machine ID, untraceable, the kind you never dock to an Ethernet cable, to keep yourself invisible. The only way I was going to be able to suck the information from Bobbie Lyles’s hard drive was to dock to it with an external drive. My phone beeped midnight. Knock on my door.

“Yup?”

My father leaned in, yawning. His gut hung over the waistband of his pajamas. “Saw your light on under the door.”

“And?”

“Did you vote today?”

“Dad? I’m sixteen.”

He eyed the laptops. “What the hell are you working on that you need two computers going?”

“Project.”

“Fascinating description.” He rubbed his eyes. “This is what you do all the time. Bird with the broken wing syndrome. Of all the girls out there, you have to fall in love with this one?”

“I’m not in
love
—”

“Look, I’m traveling a lot the next couple of weeks. It can’t be helped. It’s the heart of the fall season, you know? I’m thinking I want to take you with me.”

“Yeah, thanks,
no
.”

“Jay, if you keep messing around with Barrone’s case and you get pinched, I can’t help you. After Pete, I have no connections to PD. You screw up, you’re on your own.”

I was thinking the same about him. Traveling a lot? Would he be making any stops in Marathon?

I called Angela to tell her where I was in the hunt, but she was out at a club and in no mood to talk. “Call me tomorrow and we’ll divvy up assignments,” she said. But by tomorrow it would all be over, one way or another.

By nine a.m., my father was off to a gallery for a private showing. I tucked my hair into a blue ball cap and studied myself in the mirror: blue work Dickies and this blue button-down I wore like once a year, Christmas at my aunt’s, but it could pass for a work shirt. I holstered a Game Boy control. From far away, it might pass for an electric meter reader.

By 9:15 I was at Roberta Lyles’s house. It looked different in real life. Bigger, creepier. The black Civic was gone. I knocked on the front door. No answer. Same way after ringing the bell. This was just a double check. I already knew she was at her Dunkin’ Donut shift. I’d hacked her schedule from the local franchise’s Google calendar the night before. If she had any kids, they were at school or in daycare. I went to the side of the run-down house and pretended to get a reading from the electric meter. I slipped a pin blade into the basement door lock and broke it with a twist.

The basement wasn’t quite finished, bathroom project abandoned years ago, toilet bowl off its sewage site, half inch of dust coating it.

Upstairs: curb junk furniture. Really old TV. Coffee can by the window, overflowing menthol butts. Cheap arts and crafts everywhere, dusty God’s eyes, faded cobwebs of yarn. Cigarette burn in the filthy, track-worn carpet. Cracked window patched with secondhand USPS packing tape. Kitchen was clean, but the shelving sagged like a triple-decker smile. A bead kit on the table. Never-to-be-finished necklaces. Cheap-framed sketches, ranging from really good to great, all pencil, mostly people, lots of self-portraits, snippets of her trying to grin her way through the everyday. Two bedrooms. Big one had big clothes draped about, big pair of underwear hung over the back of an exercise bike to dry. Potted plant, dead, on the bike seat. Small bedroom: mattress on the floor. Sketches all over the walls, taped up. Studying them, I felt the room turn very cold, and very suddenly.

The faces. I recognized them. These were BHHS students. My classmates. Me, on the floor, in the gymnasium. The pep rally. No puddle, though. Is that Angela, kneeling at my side? She’s kissing my forehead. Yet more sketches on a card table that passed for a desk. Angela and a big dude, his face shadowed but vaguely familiar. Maybe Rick Kerns? They’re getting it on. I was dialing Angela to tell her she was a target when I realized I was in Angela’s bedroom. That she had drawn all these pictures.

The night before I could have sworn I knew Bobbie Lyles from somewhere. Now the resemblance was absolutely clear. She was either Angela’s much older sister or her young mother. The address Angela had given me, the one on the other side of Valedale, really was her father’s crib, but she lived here. She had me in her sights from day one, Nicole’s first Schmidt session. Angela had come into Schmidt’s that day as a walk-in. She knew Nicole was coming into school, and she wanted to see the damage she’d caused up close. She caught the way I was falling for Nicole, even that first day, and decided she had to team up with me to keep an eye on me.

My face burned. My hands ached from balling them so tightly. I felt stupid, of course. Profoundly so. But even more than that I felt guilt. In sharing information with Angela, I not only hadn’t helped Nicole; I’d put her directly in harm’s way.

I studied the dark walls covered with darker sketches. I had befriended the acid thrower, had actually begun to feel sorry for her. I was so stunned I couldn’t remember the sequence of events that had led me to this point. What was I doing in this sociopath’s bedroom, in her mind, rummaging through her dreams, her nightmares?

Her desk. The power adapter was there but no laptop. A portrait had fallen off the desk into a basket of dirty laundry. It was half photo, half sketch. It was Nicole. The photo was ripped from her Facebook. I recognized it, a close-up of Nicole at the family lake house. She’s combing her hair in front of a mirror. Angela completely blocked out the left side of Nicole’s face with glossy red pen. She’d noted it in the corner with what appeared to be a matrix of some sort:

GB

AM

I was trying to figure out what it meant, when hinges squeaked. The front screen door. I slipped into the basement stairwell. Somebody behind me said, “Very, very bad, Jay.” Girl’s voice.

I ran, but she kicked my foot from behind. She smashed my head face-first into musty green mini-golf carpet. I felt her knee in my back and something smooth, cold and heavy behind my ear. Metal, the nose of a pistol. She hissed, “You should have stuck with virtual breaking and entering.” Her gum. The flavor, strawberry. No, cherry.